Florida Power and Light customers will be receiving a small, very small, refund within the next few months. The refund will amount to less than $1 per customer, with a total cost to FPL of about $6 million once the refund has been spread to every qualifying customer. For FPL, it seems like a significant amount, but to the customers, would it really have been noticed?
In 2006, an outage at the FPL Turkey Point location caused the entire plant to be down for 5 days, generating this huge cost to FPL. The cost was passed on to the customers, at about $1 per customer, in order to pay for and repair the damages to the generator. However, the reason for the outage was not simply “wear and tear”. Instead, these extensive damages were caused by a disgruntled FPL contractor, who drilled a hole into the generator, intentionally causing the damage to hinder FPL’s business. Though only for a short lived 5 days, this unhappy contractor certainly caused significant costs to the company. FPL purchased, or better stated, FPL customers purchased replacement power until the generator could be repaired.
Regardless of the seemingly insignificant refund to most customers, the Florida Public Service Commission made their vote final this week, requiring the company to pay back this money to customers, due to the unique circumstances of the outage. Customers who use on average 1,000 kilowatt-hours of energy per month will receive this refund and can expect it within the next few months. The actually amount is said to be around .72 cents.
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